So FlyInside Flight Simulator is going Early Access on Friday. This is from the guy who added VR support to FSX, and to X-Plane and Prepar3D before their native support was ready.

It’s geared towards VR, but supports monitors too. Sadly, though it originally was slated to be compatible with FSX add-ons, it turns out it’s apparently easy to port planes over, but you can’t drop them in directly. That makes me way less excited than I initially was.

Initial release will have scenery for the whole US and 10-15 planes, with European scenery and ATC to be added later. SDK for scenery and planes will be available.

Even though it’s built on being easy to port over FSX stuff, the engine is fully multithreaded (so there goes Stusser’s “2 cores is plenty for any game” :-) and it supports Vulcan rendering. (Which means no ray-tracing on that RTX 2080 Ti you bought to make Prepar3D playable around Seattle, I guess.)

Early access price is only $32, and it’s just $25 if you bought any version of FlyInside (which I did), so I’ll happily toss some money their way to play around, even though I worry it may be like AeroFly FS2 and not get much add-on support.

I wonder what happened to that group of folks that went off and made their own company to do sims after MS shut down the studio. I think they did some scuba diving thing, and haven’t heard from them since.

Flyinside prerelease is out, and there’s a 7-minute-flight demo version.

It’s not groundbreaking, and it’s very much still a work in progress, but it’s essentially a sim that looks like P3D (well, with FS 2002 scenery, but it’s in alpha) but has about 4x the graphics performance. And a really nice set of included planes from Milviz and other companies.

I have a feeling the SDK is really similar to FSX, given how straight the airplane portovers are.

Anyway, for $25 (since I own FlyInside) it’s a no-brainer to support the development. There’s plenty already there to have fun with, just trying out the default planes, and as the features get rolled in there’s a lot of potential there.

The early access version of Fly Inside Flight Sim is available now. Just $32, $25 if you’ve purchased any version of Fly Inside. It’s interesting for a number of reasons:

It’s 64-bit, but runs dramatically better on older systems than P3D or X-Plane because it’s not based on legacy code. Supports modern graphics APIs and multi-threaded operations. 90 fps with details cranked and weather!

It fully supports VR, but performs well on flat screens too

The scenery engine looks great. The buildings, etc. are currently “developer art” and look like crap, but those are just placeholders and they’ll be updated, and there’s a scenery SDK.

It’s not add-on compatible with FSX per-se, but it’s obviously not too hard to port stuff over given all the stock planes are payware FSX planes.

Third parties can sell or give away planes anywhere, so should get much better third-party support than DoveTail.

If you’ve been wanting to fly just one of the included planes in FSX, it’s worth the price of admission! At full retail, all the planes combined would cost $389.90 for FSX. The beta includes:

Anyway, yes, it’s a fresh start, and yet another new sim, but at the low cost of entry, it’s worthwhile just to play around with the planes. (The TFDi 717 alone sells for $59.99.)

Hoping lots of folks will check it out, because it’s pretty impressive for a super-early release, they’re doing the right thing with the SDK, and I want to see them get enough support to keep developing.

So I really like flying in VR. I also really like proving my wife wrong that I wouldn’t get much value out of the T16000 HOTAS and VR headset I bought over the last few months. Trouble is DCS and IL-2 run like crap in VR for me, and I am weary of trying to improve the situation (will probably give it another go when I upgrade CPUs).

Anyway, what’s a guy to do? I figured I had two choices for flight sims that aren’t horribly optimised in VR: Aerofly FS2 or the FlyInside sim that @DennyA posted just above this.

I’ve actually bought and refunded Aerofly FS 2 before. I found it a bit too boring, but that was before I got a HOTAS and VR. The scenery it has looks fab and the VR performance is supposedly very good. On the other hand, studying the rate of development since release I am not too confident that they are going to get around to features I think (as does most reviewers of the game) are important: other planes, road objects, good weather, and more detailed flight systems. I also didn’t like that they are selling all these first-party scenery packs when these features are still missing. So, I passed.

Instead, I bought the FlyInside Flight Simulator. I am really enjoying it so far, I can get 90fps in VR or I can lay on alot of supersampling and AA and get a steady reprojected 45fps which works great too. It’s so nice to fly in VR without always worrying about fps dips and studying the settings menu! The menu system works great in VR too, everything is just so easy.

Anyway, the included planes are really nice. There’s a T38 trainer jet that looks and feels really nice. Not as nice as the DCS Viggen, but still great. Alot of other interesting planes to try as well, all with detailed cockpits, although I think some of the planes have systems that are yet to be implemented.

What really shows the early pre-release nature of the game is when you look out of the window of the plane. The scenery and buildings look rubbish, but they are up front about this and they seem like nice hard working people so I hope that this improves soon. The clouds are really nice though!

Cool beans bro, good to see you found something that works for you. Take your time getting the gumption back up to do another round of tweaking to get DCS and Il2 right. Gunnery is what VR is for man, and you know it :P (shooting approaches in foul-ass weather is also a very good use case tho)